The Greasy Strangler review: a gross-out B-movie that will turn even the strongest stomach

I'm the editor of City A.M's Life&Style section. We cover restaurants, film, theatre, the arts, technology, travel and motoring. I'm also the editor of our regular glossy magazines Bespoke (style, arts and culture) and Living (design, architecture and property). When I'm not busy editing I write about restaurants, theatre and the arts. I was once named Young Journalist of the Year.

The Greasy Strangler is gross, but also kind of compelling, like picking a giant scab and rummaging around in the wound with your fingernail.

It’s a carnival of the grotesque, wilfully offensive, trying every trick in the book – and some it came up with itself – to turn your stomach. As the title suggests, grease is a source of major fascination, with endless nauseating shots of plates piled high with cooking oil and fingers slicked with fat.

The plot – for what it is – focuses on a father, Big Ronnie, and son, Big Brayden, who make a living hosting low-fi disco walking-tours of dubious veracity. Big Ronnie, it soon transpires, is also fond of smearing himself head-to-toe in grease and throttling people until their eyes pop out of their head. The main thrust of the story, to use an appropriate term, is an incestuous psycho-sexual battle between the two for the heart of a young woman.

Eating and getting naked are big themes in The Greasy Strangler

Harking back to the joyfully vulgar movies of Troma Entertainment (clad in his greasy body-suit, Michael St. Michaels even looks a little bit like the Toxic Avenger), it feels like a comeback project by an 80s B-movie director. It is actually, however, Jim Hosking’s debut feature, although St. Michaels is best known for a bit-part in 1987 shlocky straight-to-VHS movie The Video Dead.

The structure is scatty and disjointed, with frenetic sketch-show pacing. Each scene could stand alone as a freakish vignette, and many are repeated with gleeful regularity, such as a shot of a naked old man with a gigantic prosthetic penis washing off a thick coat of grease in a carwash.

Some of the humour is slightly dubious; the majority of the male cast are, to greater or lesser degrees, transvestites, for no other reason than they look funny, and we’re invited to laugh – or wince – at the naked bodies of over-weight or wrinkly people, which feels mean-spirited.

To what end any of this? I’m not sure. It could be a comment on America’s reliance on greasy food, or a more general inability to exercise self control. Or it could just be a film about a man who likes to smear himself in fat. It’s not for everyone. I don’t think it’s for me.